Here’s Why Binge-Watching Is Good for You

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WWe were all there. We think ourselves, Let’s just look at one more episodeOr I will read another chapter before extinguishing the light. The next thing you know, the clock can be read at 3:30 am, and you exchanged a precious sleep for an overabundance of entertainment. Then guilt settles.

But a study by researchers from the University of Georgia suggests that the observation and reading of frenzy could be good for us. Engaging in marathon media consumption episodes, they suggest in an article published in ACTA PsychologicaCan make a person better able to remember what they have consumed and “could help people recover from daily stressors thanks to retrospective imagination”.

Their thinking happens like this: the more someone soak stories in a single frame, more deeply and longer are engaged with them, even after the end of the vision or reading session. Even more than for people who participate in shorter and programmed entertainment gusts, the imagination of the binger is drawn to the point that they fantasize about the characters, the intrigue and other elements of the story long after the deactivation of the screen or that the book is closed.

The researchers had previously invented the retrospective imaginative implication sentence to describe the act of engaging intensely with a story once the experience is finished, using its imagination to mentally reconstruct events and interact with the characters and the intrigue. It turns out that we already knew that this type of imaginative exercise can have some advantages, such as restoring exhausted mental resources and stress factors management. Previously, the researchers had also detailed the advantages of the observation of frenzy, including greater autonomy, kinship and psychological well-being. But it was not clear how the two phenomena were connected: if the positive results of the frenzy in television shows, the films or the books were specifically due to the advantages of the imagination with imagination with the story after the fact, and if the excessive narrative consumption or the expected consumption was larger engines of this imaginative after-glow.

The researchers therefore interviewed around 300 undergraduate students in two Midwest universities, questioning them their media consumption habits and how they remained more or less involved in specific stories when they watched or read it.

They found a strong relationship between the consumption of consecutive media and the tendency for these stories that bind to linger longer in consciousness. Not only were packaged stories more memorable among the respondents in the survey, but they were more likely to trigger an extended imaginative involvement than the stories consumed periodically planned and periodically.

“People who are used to looking at the frenzy shows often do not pass it passively but who are actively thinking about it,” said Joshua Baldwin, principal of the study and postdoctural researcher at the University of Georgia, in a press release. “They want to get involved with stories, even when they are not there to watch shows.”

This, they suggest, could mean that television programs or books that could trigger more restorative functions of an prolonged imaginative implication than waiting for a week for the next episode to be broadcast or reading a chapter every night before succumbing to sleep.

Baldwin and his co-authors admit that the study had several limits. On the one hand, the investigation was retrospective, asking participants to remember the shows they had watched or the books they had read. This means that scientists could not capture how stories affected thought while they were looking at or read them, reducing the accuracy of the data they have extracted from the recalled memories. In addition, the population studied was small and, coming from the universities of the Midwest, not necessarily representative of large bands of humanity. Finally, the study was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the observation of the frenzy has become a lifestyle among the masses in quarantine. “Our participants were likely to have the possibility of consuming accounts more often and for longer than they would normally do,” they wrote in the newspaper. Tell me about that.

Even with these warnings, this study gives a radius of hope to the bingers among us. Perhaps these results can affect part of the parability and paralyzing stigma associated with the pre-altitude of this screen a little too long or with alerted laying and reading well after bedtime.

Lead image: Hilarydesign / Shutterstock

• Bob Grant

  Published on September 5, 2025

  Bob Grant is the editor -in -chief of Nautilus.